SOMEONE ELSE'S PROBLEM

By MARVIN ZONIS; Marvin Zonis, a Middle East specialist, is chairman of the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago.

Published: November 6, 1988

THE SHAH'S LAST RIDE The Fate of an Ally. By William Shawcross. Illustrated. 463 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $19.95.

The Shah of Iran died in Cairo on July 27, 1980, shunned by nearly every world leader who had dealt with him during the 37 years of his rule. His funeral cortege told the story. Behind the coffin, his wife, Empress Farah, and his twin sister, Princess Ashraf, led the procession. A few close aides and Ardeshir Zahedi, the Shah's former son-in-law and the former Iranian Ambassador to the United States, were there. The President of Egypt, Anwar el-Sadat, and his wife had been the Shah's hosts.

The Sadats had extended impeccable hospitality to him. They had welcomed him first when he fled from Iran as the Islamic revolution swept him from the throne in January 1979. And they had welcomed him again in March 1980 when he fled Panama, fearful of being extradited to Iran, unable to receive satisfactory medical treatment for cancer and effectively refused entry by every other country in the world.

The most famous of the few foreign dignitaries at the Shah's funeral was Richard Nixon. He had come to pay his last respects to the monarch who had done so much to realize the former President's foreign policy and who had become the largest purchaser of American arms in the process. Otherwise there was the former king of Greece, Constantine II, whom the Shah had entertained so often in Iran, and a few ambassadors present.

How the world's once most powerful reigning monarch died far from his native land and without friends is the subject of ''The Shah's Last Ride.'' William Shawcross, the author of ''Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia'' and ''The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience,'' has interviewed many of the principals, and he provides a riveting account of the Shah's political and medical fate.

The political story has been told before. The Shah helped engineer OPEC's 1973 leap in oil prices and, with the increasing billions flowing into Iran, became the principal ally of the United States in the Persian Gulf. He created an imperial court that Brian Urquhart, a former under secretary general of the United Nations, once described as having ''an atmosphere of overwhelming nouveau-riche, meretricious chi-chi and sycophancy.'' Along the way, the Shah deeply offended the Iranian people and especially the country's Islamic clergy.

While the story of the Islamic revolution is ably told here, Mr. Shawcross is an absolute spellbinder when he narrates the tale of the Shah's fatal illness and his wanderings from Iran to Egypt to Morocco to the Bahamas to Mexico to the United States to Panama to Egypt.

In April 1974, Jean Bernard, whom Mr. Shawcross calls ''the pope of French hematology,'' was asked to visit Iran ''as a matter of some urgency.'' Dr. Bernard consented and took along a pupil, Georges Flandrin. The patient, of course, was the Shah, who did not permit any intrusive diagnostic procedures, fearing the consequences for matters of state. On the basis of inadequate medical tests, the doctors diagnosed their patient as suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

When the Shah's personal physician insisted that they not use words such as ''cancer'' or ''leukemia'' with the Shah - apparently those words were too unsettling to the imperial ears - the French doctors told the Shah that he had Waldenstrom's disease, a mild form of leukemia.

In September 1974, the doctors returned and determined that the disease had progressed to the stage where they could usefully begin chemotherapy. But in February 1975, they were summoned to Switzerland where their royal patient was on a skiing holiday. To their dismay, they learned that the Shah had taken none of his medication while his cancer had worsened. From then on, Dr. Flandrin was put in charge of the case, and up until the Shah fled Iran, made 35 trips there to supervise the patient's treatment.

It was not, however, until the Shah reached the Bahamas in March 1979 that his cancer took a serious turn for the worse. He discovered a swollen lymph node in his neck. He still refused to enter a hospital for fear of the effect that the news of his illness would have on his followers. (In fact, it was not just his followers the Shah worried about. Mr. Shawcross tells us that on her husband's orders, the Queen was not told of his illness until 1977.) When the Shah went to Mexico in June 1979 his American advisers -who had been sent to him by David Rockefeller - were unaware that he was being treated for cancer and called in Benjamin H. Kean, a noted parasitologist and pathologist, on the assumption that the Shah was suffering from malaria. From that time on, the Shah's medical treatment became, as Mr. Shawcross quotes him, a ''medical soap opera.'' He received care from eight different teams of physicians.

The doctors disagreed about the proper treatment for the Shah, and there were additional complications because of their egos and different nationalities - at one point or another French, American, Mexican, Panamanian and Egyptian doctors all worked on the Shah.